It All Starts From The Soul - Jorsh Peña

Dry and Flat or Full of Flavour?

Whenever ‘classic’ songs are messed with, the music community responds in one of two ways. For every envelope-pushing avant-garde innovator praising the creativity and new direction the music has been taken in, there’s a staunchly defiant member of rock & roll’s old guard, outraged that such a vintage gem of music has been disturbed from its resting place in the musical pantheon.

As ‘classic’ songs go, few bands have as many in their back-catalogue as Fleetwood Mac. ‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘Never Going Back Again’, ‘The Chain’ (hell, pretty much every song on Rumours), ‘Everywhere’, ‘Little Lies’… the list goes on and on. It was a bold move, then, for English folk quartet The Salt Flats to tackle these tunes on their newest album, their second EP, and one which is made up entirely of covers of Fleetwood Mac songs.

Fleetwood Mac Songs EP by The Salt Flats

The results are interesting. The Salt Flats have an engagingly rootsy bluegrass style and their harmonies are spot on (the vocalisations on their version of ‘Never Going Back Again’ reminded me a lot of a Knoxville-based bluegrass group called Pine Mountain Railroad). That being said, these are songs which were crafted with an overwhelming amount of care and precision in the first instance; Fleetwood Mac’s torturous and painstakingly meticulous production process is legendary.

Thus, some tracks are great, but some fall flat. The Salt Flats’ cover of ‘Everywhere’, for example, cuts an unimpressive figure on the EP, with Cara Cowan and Katie Richardson’s vocals not quite matching up to the original magic of Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks. Overall, though, this is a solid effort, with inventive and promising folk re-workings of some of pop music’s most recognisable and enduring songs.

https://soundcloud.com/thesaltflats/the-salt-flats-never-going

Thus, some tracks are great, but some fall flat. The Salt Flats’ cover of ‘Everywhere’, for example, cuts an unimpressive figure on the EP, with Cara Cowan and Katie Richardson’s vocals not quite matching up to the original magic of Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks. Overall, though, this is a solid effort, with inventive and promising folk re-workings of some of pop music’s most recognisable and enduring songs.